#text reader software computer

[mellowavenuehottub]

Simple Text Reader Software for Windows 11

Text reader software to convert text to speech with a natural voice and software to read aloud text for professionals

If anyone favor, you can simply replicate text right into it coming from the clipboard as well as the application will definitely begin reviewing it really for people promptly. The minute opened, content as well as mix content in to that text reader software as well as click on this produce MP3 key. Right now there are an amount of straightforward put together choices as soon as we have completed this transfer to make sure that you get going in such a way that suits this personal tastes. It is adventure particularly if ever this text has many different practices.

That little size as well as availability of the program will make it welcoming to users of any fields. Often times we might just be proficient at talking a language, although obtain difficulties of going through it really. This is not the problem along with the program, however. All voice gets the clearness of any type of regular people speeches, that makes any word understandable.

Current changes can easily also review and decipher content. Still the attribute to saving that audio file may be helpful for any individual, for whenever they would like to return to that text without any having to find a long piece of content. That vocal reader application is a fantastic device if you are possessing fuss with any kind of complex phrases that are tough to verbalize in you scholastic newspaper or even data sheet. Increasing the website and also getting an even more great percentage of this online community.

What Are In Fact the Perks of Utilization the Text Reader Software?

Several qualified people take advantage of software just like text reader software or if you want to get a product a little bit lower costly to set up with you go for text reader software

This workplace or else class room functions, you can surely also choose which line amount to start type from the settings choice. Anyone are going to coincide us that taking in text by means of a cellular phone is not as beneficial as our experts prefer.

That commonly changing as well as increasing demands for a content to speech program at home, classrooms as well as for business functions help make several other text reader software harder to keep due to that costly structures. This content to voice application also be much better called a kind of voice formation what receives content, turns it into sound, and also releases that as talked terms. Effortless text reader software are incredibly good for all of the users and the customers, content writers and also users. This makes the entire system user-friendly whether we desire to save documents to listen to later. Make use of the available text alternative and also let this text reader software perform his personal job even though people kick back.

She will set it behind as well as enable it perform while continuing the various other task. The text reader software will probably then build an audio file for people in this chosen part. The text reader software is therefore extremely versatile adequate to read e-books, websites or even text.

Text Reader Software for Novice and Professionals with Text Reader Software for PC

The helpful text reader software for for Windows

Similar to different software which are made for that Windows system, a window look on display screen if everybody start it. That flexibility of gadget and also networks make the text reader software a helpful device in situations beginning with instructional modern technology and also aid of the in different ways able to a basic help for relaxation of the sights and also for leisure.

The material managers as well as writers additionally benefit from the TTS application as it really strengthens quality as well as beauty of the internet information. By having the TTS speaker, that user listen to that content free from must strain your eyes attempting to go through the tiny typefaces. This application comes with fully human, non automated check out more selection of voices either men and women and concerning a vast scope old teams with rate environments.

For instance, this program can be utilized with Windows 8 if ever preferred. If you wish to produce an acoustic report, then simply hit the produce MP3 key. The kinds of laptops made in that previous handful of weeks vary considerably along with those created in. Every you need to have to perform is replicate this text into this software, as well as your desktop computer will start reading it out loud. Alternatively, people may merely talk to the application to begin checking out a web page for anyone through entering or replicating in the link address concerned. Things embed that text reader software, for example, advertising product, that content of internet sites, info reports as well as notes people may possess produced on the personal computer.

[askablindperson]

In what way does alt text serve as an accessibility tool for blind people? Do you use text to speech? I'm having trouble imagining that. I suppose I'm in general not understanding how a blind person might use Tumblr, but I'm particularly interested in the function of alt text.

In short, yes. We use text to speech (among other access technology like braille displays) very frequently to navigate online spaces. Text to speech software specifically designed for blind people are called screen readers, and when use on computers, they enable us to navigate the entire interface using the keyboard instead of the mouse And hear everything on screen, as long as those things are accessible. The same applies for touchscreens on smart phones and tablets, just instead of using keyboard commands, it alters the way touch affect the screen so we hear what we touch before anything actually gets activated. That part is hard to explain via text, but you should be able to find many videos online of blind people demonstrating how they use their phones.

As you may be able to guess, images are not exactly going to be accessible for text to speech software. Blindness screen readers are getting better and better at incorporating OCR (optical character recognition) software to help pick up text in images, and rudimentary AI driven Image descriptions, but they are still nowhere near enough for us to get an accurate understanding of what is in an image the majority of the time without a human made description.

Now I’m not exactly a programmer so the terminology I use might get kind of wonky here, but when you use the alt text feature, the text you write as an image description effectively gets sort of embedded onto the image itself. That way, when a screen reader lands on that image, Instead of having to employ artificial intelligences to make mediocre guesses, it will read out exactly the text you wrote in the alt text section.

Not only that, but the majority of blind people are not completely blind, and usually still have at least some amount of residual vision. So there are many blind people who may not have access to a screen reader, but who may struggle to visually interpret what is in an image without being able to click the alt text button and read a description. Plus, it benefits folks with visual processing disorders as well, where their visual acuity might be fine, but their brain’s ability to interpret what they are seeing is not. Being able to click the alt text icon in the corner of an image and read a text description Can help that person better interpret what they are seeing in the image, too.

Granted, in most cases, typing out an image description in the body of the post instead of in the alt text section often works just as well, so that is also an option. But there are many other posts in my image descriptions tag that go over the pros and cons of that, so I won’t digress into it here.

Utilizing alt text or any kind of image description on all of your social media posts that contain images is single-handedly one of the simplest and most effective things you can do to directly help blind people, even if you don’t know any blind people, and even if you think no blind people would be following you. There are more of us than you might think, and we have just as many varied interests and hobbies and beliefs as everyone else, so where there are people, there will also be blind people. We don’t only hang out in spaces to talk exclusively about blindness, we also hang out in fashion Facebook groups and tech subreddits and political Twitter hashtags and gaming related discord servers and on and on and on. Even if you don’t think a blind person would follow you, You can’t know that for sure, and adding image descriptions is one of the most effective ways to accommodate us even if you don’t know we’re there.

I hope this helps give you a clearer understanding of just how important alt text and image descriptions as a whole are for blind accessibility, and how we make use of those tools when they are available.

[fanhackers]

Anne Kustritz’s Identity, Community, and Sexuality in Slash Fan Fiction

Anne Kustritz’s new book, Identity, Community, and Sexuality in Slash Fan Fiction: Pocket Publics has just been released by Routledge (2024).  You might know Kustritz, a scholar of fan cultures and transmedia storytelling, from her early essay “Slashing the Romance Narrative,” in the Journal of American Culture (2003) or maybe from some of her more recent work on transmedia and serial storytelling. But this new book is an exciting addition to the fan studies canon, and Fanhackers readers might be particularly interested, because the book “explores slash fan fiction communities during the pivotal years of the late 1990s and the early 2000s as the practice transitioned from print to digital circulation,”--which is the era that a lot of the fans involved in the creation of the OTW came from. As I noted in my book blurb, “​​While there has been an explosion of fan studies scholarship in the last two decades, we haven't had an ethnography of fan fiction communities since the early 1990s. Kustritz's Pocket Publics rectifies that, documenting the generation of slash fans who built much of fandom's infrastructure and many of its community spaces, both on and off the internet. This generation has had an outsized impact on contemporary fan cultures, and Kustritz shows how these fans created an alternative and subcultural public sphere: a world of their own.”

Kustritz doesn’t just analyze and contextualize fandom, she also describes her own experiences as a participant-observer, and these might resonate with a lot of fans (especially Fanhackers-reading fans!)  Early on in the book, Kustritz describes her how her own early interest in fandom blurred between the personal and the academic:

Because I began studying slash only a year after discovering fandom on-line, my interest has always been an intricate tangle of pleasure in the texts themselves, connection to brilliantly creative women, and fascination with intersections between fan activities and academic theory.  I may now disclaim my academic identity as an interdisciplinary scholar with concentrations in media anthropology and cultural studies and begin to pinpoint my fan identity as a bifictional multifandom media fan; however, I only gradually became aware of and personally invested in these categories as I grew into them.  This section defines the scope of the online observation period that preceded the active interview phase of this research.  In so doing it also examines the messy interconnections between my academic and fannish interests and identities. Trying to pick apart what portion of my choices derived from fannish pleasure and which from academic interest helps to identify the basic internal tensions and categories that slash fan fiction communities relied upon to define themselves, the pressures exerted upon these systems by the digital migration, and complications in academic translation of fannish social structures.

Later in the book, Kustritz discusses how fans have organized and advocated for themselves as a public; in particular, there’s a fascinating chapter about the ways in which fandom has adopted and transformed the figure of the pirate to forge new ways of thinking about copyright and authorship.  If the OTW was formed to argue that making fanworks is a legitimate activity, the figure of the pirate signifies a protest against the law and a refusal to be shamed by it: 

[F]ans also use the figure of the pirate to make arguments that validate some fan activities and consign others to illegitimacy.   At the urging of several friends involved with slash, I attended my first non-slash focused science fiction and fantasy convention in the summer of 2004.  The program schedule announced a Sunday morning panel discussion provocatively titled “Avast, Matey: The Ethics of Pirating Movies, Music, and Software” with the subheading “Computers today can distribute [more] intellectual property than ever before--not always legally. Is it ever okay to copy, download, and/or distribute media? Sorry, ladies, none of us will be dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow.”  The panel’s subheading, which obliquely warned away both lusty women and pirates, led a small contingent of slash fans to shake off Saturday night’s convention revelries unreasonably early and implement a plan of their own for Sunday’s panel.  As many fan conventions encourage costumes, known as “cosplay,” one of my friends and research participants happened to have been dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow of Pirates of the Caribbean that weekend, so I entered the piracy panel with Captain Jack and a motley crew of slashers, some of them intent upon commandeering the discussion.

The clash that followed exemplifies a structural fault line between various types of fan communities regarding their shared norms and beliefs about copyright law, the relationship between fans and producers, and appropriate fan behavior.

If you want to find out how this clash played out–well, you’ll just have to read the book. 😀

–Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer

[cultivating-saplings]

In honour of 4/13x15 I'm posting (a very slightly edited version of) the paper I wrote on the Unofficial Homestuck Collection for one of my classes last term. The language/tone is a bit more academic than what I would usually put up on here, but it's exam season so... 

Don’t Turn Your Back on the Body:

The Resurrection of Homestuck After the Death of Flash

Digital media is, broadly speaking, very difficult to preserve. The rapid pace of technological development means that obsolescence and decay present a consistent threat to the availability of natively digital works. Most computers produced in 2023 no longer have built in CD drives, and I feel fairly confident in asserting that none are being produced with floppy disk readers outside of hobbyist spaces. Issues with the accessibility of physically stored digital media can be mitigated (at least for now) by the use of external readers, but the preservation of fully digital media, born and hosted in its entirety on the Internet, is a different beast entirely.

This is, in part, an issue of pure volume; no one organization could ever hope to archive the vast amounts of stuff that the Internet is constantly producing, let alone organize it into a resource that could be used effectively. Like Borges’ cartographers who created “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire,” to fully archive the Internet would be to replicate it in its entirety. Thus scope becomes a central question of fully digital archiving. 

The Internet Archive, which also operates the Wayback Machine, answers that question with a resounding and all-encompassing ‘yes’ — their stated goal is to “provide Universal Access to All Knowledge,” but even this comes with caveats. The organization freely permits members of the public to upload files to the archive and save pages on the Wayback Machine, but the work carried out by its official volunteers is more curated, and prioritizes webpages which have been identified as particularly important.

The Internet Archive is very effective within its own space, yes, but it has its limits. When the piece of work you are trying to archive is composed of not just static text and images, but longform animations and complex browser-based games, where do you put it? What do you do when the software necessary to access these elements of the work has been taken offline? And what happens if the people who were supposed to safeguard it fail to do so?

These were the issues that the fans of Homestuck faced in 2020 as the impending deactivation of Flash loomed on the horizon.

But first, before I properly explain what the Unofficial Homestuck Collection really is and why it is so effective as a digital archive, let me tell you about Homestuck. 

Frustrated with the poorly implemented official preservation of the comic, and with a lot of free time on his hands, one fan began the Unofficial Homestuck Collection as a personal project during lockdown, during the “depths of 2020.” As the project changed hands and more fans became involved over the following years, its true scope came into focus: the Collection would preserve not only Homestuck itself, in its entirety and with its Flash-dependent pages intact, but also as much of its contextual material as possible, thus making it a prime example of the effectiveness of fan-driven digital archiving and preservation. Because the people who created the Collection are long standing fans of Homestuck, they know which pieces of peripheral material will provide the context the comic demands. The Collection preserves Homestuck as a text in a way that would be impossible in an analogue format, creating an archive both of the work and of the experience of reading it in a serialized format.

Andrew Hussie began* Homestuck on April 13th of 2009, and published it serially on mspaintadventures.com, his personal website at the time, until its conclusion on April 13th, 2016. Prior to beginning Homestuck, Hussie had been publishing short webcomics and pieces of fiction for several years on his older website, Team Special Olympics, since 2004, which had gained him a small but very loyal following. This following was centered mostly around the forum attached to the TSO website, which hosted the first of Hussie’s ‘MS Paint Adventures,’ Jailbreak, in September of 2006. Jailbreak was a short comic which Hussie produced as a collaborative writing game on these forums, in the style of early text adventures.

Beginning with the prompt, “You wake up locked in a deserted jail cell, completely alone. There is nothing at all in your cell, useful or otherwise,” Hussie then wrote the rest of the comic according to the first comment posted after every page. This, perhaps predictably, resulted in a barely coherent mess of a story.

Following the conclusion of Jailbreak after a short 134 pages, Hussie would produce two more comics prior to beginning Homestuck: the unfinished Bard Quest (June-July 2007) and Problem Sleuth (March 2008-April 2009), which was his longest work so far at the time of its conclusion. Problem Sleuth in particular represented a substantial increase in production quality and general coherency over Jailbreak, as Hussie gained experience using the MSPA forums as tools for collaborative storytelling, reigning in the meandering narrative by allowing himself to be more selective about which forum responses he followed.

Hussie would continue this more controlled style of forum collaboration throughout the first three Acts of Homestuck, which followed a much more focused story than any of his prior work, thanks to his decision to use reader input only in specific parts of the comic. In the introduction to the print edition of the first Act, Hussie described his own role during the production of these first Acts as “dungeon master, a game engine responding to input, and an improv comic all in one.” During the process of writing Act 4, Hussie stopped taking prompts from readers entirely, and would construct the rest of the comic ostensibly as its sole author.

‘Okay,’ you might now be thinking, ‘you’ve given me the context, but what the hell is Homestuck? And what’s it about?’ Well, to wildly oversimplify a very complex piece of media, Homestuck is a webcomic about four young online friends who play a video game that causes the end of their universe and grants them the power to create a new one as they see fit. It is a story about growing up and realizing you’ve been forever changed by your experiences, a story about leaving behind the life you knew and constructing a new one. It is also a story about time travel and paradoxes, genetics and cloning, a large number of aliens, a possibly larger number of puppets (at least one of which is sentient), and an unfortunate amount of clowns. 

This story slowly unfolds over the course of 8126 pages, 817,929 words, and 166 animated panels, 95 of which contained some degree of interactivity and all of which total over four hours in length. Most of the comic’s pages consist of a main image, usually a short looping gif, accompanied by a text description or dialogue, which is almost always written in the format and style of online chat-logs between characters. As mentioned previously, however, these simpler gif-and-description pages are interspersed with longer videos, animated in Flash and soundtracked by one of Hussie’s several collaborators.

The first of these animated panels was uploaded a few weeks into Homestuck’s publication — an animated opening title-card for the comic, scored ominously with sounds of howling wind and windchimes. This first Flash panel was relatively simple, but the next would introduce a bespoke soundtrack (“Harlequin” by Mark Hadley), and the third would include simple interactivity. These soundtracked animations and interactive segments increased in scope and complexity over the course of the comic’s run; the final animated page in the comic, “[S] Collide,” comes in at nearly twenty minutes in length, and some of the larger interactive segments can take upwards of two hours to fully explore. 

While some of the later interactive pages were developed in an engine based on HTML5, most of Homestuck would be built using Adobe Flash, and would depend on the program for basic functionality. This would prove disastrous for the comic’s long term preservation. Flash was very popular, and had become ubiquitous by the early 2010s, but it had security issues which were easy to exploit, its range was fairly limited in terms of what kinds of animations it could produce, and, as its most fatal flaw, it couldn’t run on mobile. Thus with the expanding use of smartphones and tablets, Flash became less and less practical as a tool for web developers, and Adobe began slowly preparing to kill it. On December 31st, 2020, Adobe sent Flash off to the farm where it could frolic and play in the digital sunshine, leaving many online communities facing a crisis. How do you preserve a text when its foundations have crumbled?

With Homestuck using Flash in such an integral way, the issue of preservation was an important one. After the finale, Hussie would post some short post-credits stories to Snapchat from October 2016 to August 2017, as well as a longer epilogue in April 2019, before stepping away from any formal involvement with the comic in 2020. In 2018, Hussie had given the distribution rights for Homestuck to VIZ Media, which primarily handled the English-language publication of several manga series, and had left the rights to the IP and the freedom to produce new work to former collaborators. Thus it was VIZ who took on the task of officially preserving Homestuck against the death of Flash.

To say their efforts were unsatisfactory would, I think, be paying them too great a compliment. The complex and highly detailed Flash animations were replaced with embedded YouTube links to low-quality screen-captures of the originals. The hours-long walkaround games were not translated at all, replaced with ‘choose your own adventure’ style pages of text and links. The official version of Homestuck as it currently exists fails to capture a lot of what made the comic work, because it removes a lot of the gamified elements of the comic that are so integral to its storytelling.

There are many snapshots of the website from before the walkaround games were taken down on the Wayback Machine, but the Flash emulator that archive.org uses is very inconsistent, frequently becoming stuck on looping loading screens or failing to process assets correctly. While the dubious preservation of the long Flash animations is a real issue on its own, the lack of any attempt to replicate the format of these longform games represents the loss of something essential to the comic. Homestuck is, throughout the whole of its story, intertwined with the visual and cultural language of video games. The loss of the complex interactivity of these panels fundamentally changes how the reader is permitted to engage with them and, by extension, with Homestuck’s narrative as a whole. The official version of Homestuck that exists online is no longer complete. 

This incredibly poor preservation was the impetus behind the creation of the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. In its most basic form, the Collection is simply a preserved and restored version of Homestuck, intact and in high quality, accessible through a downloadable client, rather than online — reducing the Collection down to this basic description does it a disservice. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection includes not just Homestuck, but all of Hussie’s prior work: Jailbreak, Bard Quest, and Problem Sleuth are in there, but so are the full contents of his first website, Team Special Olympics, alongside archived versions of his now-deleted accounts on various social media platforms, and copies of threads from the MSPA forums that he would later reference in the main comic. The Collection also includes material that Hussie released alongside Homestuck, like the in-fiction blog of one of the main characters, various short comics written by guest authors, and a full episode of an in-universe childrens’ cartoon.

These peripheral materials are interesting and provide context for some of the more obscure references throughout Homestuck, but many of them were not produced until well into the comic’s run, and assume an audience that is caught up with the most recent update, making them dangerously full of spoilers for the unaware new reader. This issue is solved by the appropriately named ‘new reader mode.’ One of a variety of useful accessibility tools included in the Collection, the new reader mode tracks which page a user has reached, and implements a universal spoiler cloak over the whole program, hiding all materials that were released after their most recent page’s publication. This tool is what transforms the Unofficial Homestuck Collection from an archive of a text, into an archive of an experience.

De Kosnik argues that fan-driven archiving serves as a way for fans to mediate their own temporal experience of a text, describing websites hosting fanworks as mechanisms which “maintain the possibility of individuals joining fandoms… long after a media text has ceased to air.” While De Kosnik’s focus is on archives of fanworks and their function in ongoing fan spaces, I would argue that this framework, which centers the impact of serialization on the dynamics of fan communities, fits extremely well when applied to the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. Homestuck was published serially over the course of seven years, accompanied by blog posts, side comics, music, and other pieces of peripheral media that were released in tandem with the comic itself.

Updates were highly anticipated events, and fan communities were structured around them — one user on Tumblr found an unlisted part of the MSPA forums where Hussie posted new pages before they were published, and this “MSPA Prophet” became a fixture of the fandom for their ability to predict when the next update would come. The event that was an update (or upd8, after the typing style of a popular character) was a central aspect of the experience of reading Homestuck during its publication, and it is one that is very difficult to recover now that the comic exists as a static, completed work. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, through its new reader mode, functions as a solution to that absence. It does more than safeguard the reader against unwanted spoilers: it temporarily transforms Homestuck back into an incomplete text. 

Homestuck makes use of the assumed preexisting knowledge of the reader, and their “intuitive familiarity” with various types of digital media and culture, especially ones which are inherently participatory. The story’s use of narrative motifs and referential easter-eggs allows Homestuck to function, in Hussie’s own words, as “both a story and a puzzle,” but that “There [are] a range of ways to interface with it[…] Failing to grasp everything shouldn’t preclude basic enjoyment, nor is it a symptom of failure by either the reader or the story.” In the most frequent example of repeated symbology in Homestuck, Hussie peppers the text with references to the number ‘413,’ simplified from April 13th, the day the comic began.

The story follows four friends who are all thirteen years old, many of the songs on the comic’s soundtrack are exactly four minutes and thirteen seconds long, and the timestamps on chat-logs show that characters frequently begin important conversations at precisely 4:13, to name just a few of the number’s appearances. The combination of puzzle and story in Homestuck extends beyond these kinds of motifs, however, and into the way Hussie employs referential humour.

Some of these references are fairly easy to catch; in Act 4, one of the main characters is gifted the Warhammer of Zillyhoo — a brightly coloured weapon which originally appeared in Problem Sleuth. Others, however, are much more obscure. The older brother of another main character runs a business creating bizarre, semi-ironic puppet pornography. Most of the audience read this as an absurdist joke about the internet’s love for offputting porn; the subset of fans who had been following Hussie for several years, or those who looked into Hussie’s early activity on the MSPA forums, however, would find themselves with new understanding of a long-running joke. This element of the experience of reading Homestuck is something that the Unofficial Homestuck Collection not only preserves, but makes readily accessible to the comic’s readers in a way that would not have been possible during the comic’s publication.

On a purely theoretical basis, I would argue that the Unofficial Homestuck Collection is valuable not just in the context of contemporary fan activity, but as a potentially valuable resource for future research. Homestuck is a foundational piece of the current cultural landscape, its influences permeating both digital and analog media in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways.

Undertale, titan of online culture that it is, was created by Toby Fox, who was the composer behind a large amount of the music in Homestuck and was, during the game’s production, living in Andrew Hussie’s basement. Tamsyn Muir, author of the Locked Tomb tetralogy, began her writing career as a prominent figure in the Homestuck fandom on Tumblr and Archive of Our Own. Although the reach of her original work has thoroughly outgrown her fandom roots, Muir includes sly references to Homestuck in several places in her books. Hell, one of the animators working on Bluey, a cartoon aimed at very young children, included references to Homestuck in the backgrounds of episodes they worked on, as easter-eggs for the benefit of parents in the know. All of this is to say that Homestuck has its hooks deep within the culture of the Internet, and its impacts will, I think, be felt for a long time yet.

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection is certainly not immune to digital decay or link rot, but it is resistant to them, since it is hosted on a large and well established website (GitHub), and, once downloaded, can be accessed without an internet connection, and shared freely. For the hypothetical future researcher, the Collection contains resources to mitigate the frustration of trying to hunt down pieces of contextual or peripheral material by packaging them with the text itself — it functions like a sourcebook. 

Bibliography

Bamboshu, and GiovanH. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection. 2020. https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/ 

De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10248.001.0001.

Glaser, Tim. “Homestuck as a Game: A Webcomic between Playful Participation, Digital Technostalgia, and Irritating Inventory Systems.” In Comics and Videogames. Edited by Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, and Jan-Noel Thon. 96–112. Routledge, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003035466-8.

Hussie, Andrew. Homestuck. MS Paint Adventures, 2009-2016. https://homestuck.com. 

Nakhaie, FS. “Reproduce and Adapt: Homestuck in Print and Digital (Re)Incarnations.” Convergence, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221141961.

Read MS Paint Adventures. “Statistics.” Last modified April 7, 2018. http://readmspa.org/stats/.

Veale, Kevin. “‘Friendship Isn’t an Emotion Fucknuts’: Manipulating Affective Materiality to Shape the Experience of Homestuck’s Story.” Convergence 25, no. 5-6 (2019): 1027–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517714954. 

[ugackminer]

So, I made a tool to stop AI from stealing from writers

So seeing this post really inspired me in order to make a tool that writers could use in order to make it unreadable to AI.

And it works! You can try out the online demo, and view all of the code that runs it here!

It does more than just mangle text though! It's also able to invisibly hide author and copyright info, so that you can have definitive proof that someone's stealing your works if they're doing a simple copy and paste!

Below is an example of Scrawl in action!

Τо հսⅿаոѕ, 𝗍հᎥꜱ 𝗍ех𝗍 𐌉ο໐𝗄ꜱ ո໐𝗋ⅿаⵏ, 𝖻ս𝗍 𝗍о ᴄоⅿрս𝗍е𝗋ꜱ, Ꭵ𝗍'ѕ սո𝗋еаⅾа𝖻ⵏе!

[Text reads "To humans, this text looks normal, but to computers, it's unreadable!"]

Of course, this "Anti-AI" mode comes with some pretty serious accessibility issues, like breaking screen readers and other TTS software, but there's no real way to make text readable to one AI but not to another AI.

If you're okay with it, you can always have Anti-AI mode off, which will make it so that AIs can understand your text while embedding invisible characters to save your copyright information! (as long as the website you're posting on doesn't remove those characters!)

But, the Anti-AI mode is pretty cool.

[roosterforme]

Is It Working For You? Part 13 | Rooster x Reader

Just in case you need to start at the beginning or visit an earlier chapter, check out my Masterlist!

Summary: Bradley is starting to feel like he's just your dirty little secret, and that is not a moniker he wants to wear.

Warnings: 18+ only, smut, angst, fluff, some swears, adult banter

Length: 2900 words

Pairing: Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw x Female Reader

You felt like shit all day on Friday. You'd barely slept Thursday night, even though you were snuggled up against Bradley's warm body. And when you had slipped your hand into his underwear in the night, coaxing him toward you, it made you feel terrible in the end. Because he really wanted to be with you, more than just physically. Like actually be with you. He'd been telling you that all along, for weeks, since the very beginning. You knew since that first night at the Hard Deck, after he bumped into your stool that he would be whatever you wanted him to be. But now you were the one pumping the brakes.

Because you were scared.

All you had wanted to do was make him happy, but instead he was looking like a kicked puppy again. While not outright avoiding you, he kept himself very busy on the tarmac, going over safety checks and maintenance procedures all day. 

Maria was the first one to ask you what was wrong as you were updating your computer software in the tower. "I don't know what to do. He wants a relationship. Some sort of label. I don't know if I'm ready for this right now."

Maria squeezed your shoulders. "Girl, only you can decide what's best for you. But, don't even try to tell me he hasn't fallen in love."

You spun around in your chair to face her. "You think he's in love with me?"

Maria nodded seriously. "Yes. When you fell asleep on him while we were watching the movie, his face was completely unguarded as he looked at you and held you and rubbed your back. He's beyond smitten. It's honestly next level."

Your heart was not made to handle what you were feeling. It was a disturbing combination of elation and terror. Bradley Bradshaw was your ideal. You didn't want anyone else. But... what if it cost one or both of you a promotion? What if Bradley got stationed back in Virginia Beach again? What if he didn't even make it back from the Daggers mission?

Your stomach lurched just as Cam waltzed into your office. "Everyone is drinking at the Hard Deck tonight. You know, last day of work before we're all out of here." 

You barely heard him but you nodded along. You turned away from Maria and Cam and pretended to get your computer and other items in order so you could pack them for travel. But really you were trying to decide if you believed that Bradley might be in love. You played back all of your interactions with him. He was so smooth right from the start, clearly an accomplished flirt. But he'd let you be the one in control of almost everything. You were the one to decide when that first scorching kiss happened. He took you out on a date under your terms, not his. He seemed to know you were the one who would be holding back, and wanted to make you comfortable. And he had told you he'd be good to you, let you get away with more than he should.

It was too much, and you needed to focus on something else. You kept pushing everything related to Bradley out of your mind, even after he texted you.

Bradley Rooster Bradshaw <3 <3 <3: see you at the hard deck tonight?

You gave yourself the excuse that you needed to call your parents before it got too late on the east coast. You stayed on the phone with them for a long time while you drove home and made dinner, letting them know you'd be out of the country for a bit. You avoided texting Bradley back while you got dressed to go out and put some makeup on. But when you pulled into the parking lot, you didn't see his Bronco anywhere. 

You walked inside with Cam and Maria, and immediately you saw Phoenix. "Hey, do you know where Bradley is?" you asked her as you got your phone out to finally text him back, feeling bad for ignoring him for hours.

"He'll be here," she replied, giving you a small smile. "You're going to be good to him, right?"

You just looked at her for a moment before you felt a hand on your arm. Convinced it was Bradley, you spun around with a smile, only to find Kyle. 

"What do you want?" you asked him, wishing he would vanish. 

"Hey, I....just wanted to say hi, let you know I'm cool with what you said to me last weekend. See if I can buy you a drink to say sorry."

You just stared at him, kind of shocked. "Seriously?"

"Yeah, seriously. Cam ripped me a new one, and I feel bad. We've known each other for awhile, you know? Come on, I'll get you a beer."

So you ended up sitting at the bar with Kyle, your backs to the door. He apologized, told you not to feel awkward if you ran into each other, and then you just chatted for a bit. You told him you would be flying out on Sunday morning via Comanche, and he wished you safe travels. 

You felt a little bit better, now you just needed to see Bradley.

-----------------------------------------

Today had been rough, but Bradley finally came to terms with what you had told him the night before. He would make himself be cool with doing things your way, because it was better than any alternative where he wasn't with you at all. You cared about him. You wanted him. That's what mattered. The rest could wait. He would be the very definition of chill. 

It was still early when he arrived at the bar, but he saw that your shitty little car was already here. He made his way inside and spotted you immediately. Your hair was loose and you were wearing your ripped up jeans and a tank top with your boat shoes. You looked so good, sipping on a bottle of your favorite beer. 

You turned slightly and laughed, and that's when Bradley saw you were sitting with that asshole Kyle. And you looked happy about it this time. Kyle leaned in a bit and nodded at something you were saying, clearly charmed by you. What the actual hell?

Suddenly Bradley understood how it must have felt for all the other girls before you who had caught feelings, just to see him move on a few days later. This was not fun for him at all. 

He stalked over to you and dropped a hand heavily on your shoulder. "Y/N, what the hell?"

You turned toward him with a bright smile on your face that vanished as soon as you saw his expression. 

Kyle jumped off of his stool. "Hey, we were just having a drink, it's not-"

"I wasn't talking to you, man," Bradley told him, never taking his eyes off of your face. Kyle just mumbled and shrunk off into the crowd, and Bradley dropped into his seat. 

"What's wrong? Do you want to go outside and talk?" you whispered to him, gesturing toward the door. 

"No, let's talk right here." Although the volume in the Hard Deck was loud enough that nobody would be able to hear you, he wanted to be seen with you. He needed to. 

"Okay... What do you want to talk about?" 

Bradley pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned. "Come on, Sweetheart. You're really going to sit here and flirt with some guy you assured me you're no longer interested in? How is that fair to me?"

"I wasn't!" you insisted. "I wouldn't do that!"

"You won't let me call you mine, so somehow I don't count when you feel like chatting up that asshole? If we keep it casual, then you don't have to feel bad? You gonna go find Jake next and make his night a little nicer?"

"Jeez, Bradley, that's not even what happened! Give me a little credit here!" you whispered harshly.

He stared at your face, your eyes pleading with him to believe you. "I thought I could be cool about this, but I guess not. What are we? And don't you dare try to say we're just friends. Or friends with benefits. I'm not going to agree with that."

When you didn't respond, he let out a long breath and said, "You know, I'm starting to feel like your dirty little secret. Like you just want me around to make you feel good, fuck you all night, and spill my heart out to you. Don't you feel this connection?"

"Yes, of course I feel it! You're not the only one lost in their feelings here, Roo! You're not! I just don't know what else to tell you. I've never been good at this stuff. All the other guys I dated-"

"Let me stop you right there. See, that's the problem. I'm not talking about pasts here, Sweetheart, I'm talking about our futures."

He watched you chew on your lip before he continued. "I don't see how being in a relationship with me will make you look bad. So we'll have to have a conversation or two with some commanding officers? I'm more than willing to do that. So we'll have to be assigned to separate task groups from here on out? That's all good too, Baby Girl. I can keep my hands to myself during work hours, and treat you with the utmost respect. But you're killing me here."

Bradley paused to really look at your face. You were on the verge of tears. God, somehow he was the asshole in this scenario. He was the one who was going to make you cry, when all he wanted was to hold you and love you. 

"I'm leaving," he managed to say through his pulse pounding in his throat. He needed to get away from you before he did something really idiotic that he would regret. 

"I'll go with you," you said, a hiccup in your voice. "I want to go with you."

Bradley stood and ran his hands through his hair. "I'm going back to the barracks, and I'm too tired to figure out a way to sneak you in, just so we can fuck around. It's Friday night, the building is teeming with people. I'll just see you later."

And then he was gone. 

---------------------------------------

Your hands were shaking as you drove back to your apartment. Before you left the Hard Deck, you texted Maria and told her you were going to the barracks for the night. Then on your way to the parking lot, Phoenix had caught up to you and simply said, "He's worth it. I'm telling you, he's worth all of it. So please figure it out, because I don't know if he can."

Now you were stopping home to get your overnight bag and heading out once again. And you were pissed. Your thoughts were racing. Everything was moving too fast. You needed time to slow down. You just needed more time with Bradley. Everything would make sense if you had a few more weeks, or even just a few more days. 

You still had his visitor parking pass in your car, so that made the first step easier. After you parked and grabbed your bag, you made your way to the main entrance of the barracks. Bradley was right, this place was packed with officers and visitors. There were a ton of people waiting to be scanned in, so you stood at the end of the line and waited. 

"Hey, Lieutenant Y/L/N!" You turned and saw Fanboy on his way inside with a pizza box. "What brings you to the barracks?" he asked with a warm smile as he scanned his badge through the gate. He always had been very friendly.

"Oh, hey, Fanboy. I'm... I'm just here to see someone," you replied, shifting your weight from one foot to the other. You didn't know what else to say.

"Rooster?" he asked with a grin.

Your eyes went wide. "Yeah... how did you know that?" He definitely must have seen you sneaking in at some point.

He just shrugged and smiled more. "Well, Rooster is the only one living here, other than Halo, Phoenix, Hangman and me. Halo is kind of antisocial, Phoenix is already at the Hard Deck, and Hangman would be swinging from the rafters shouting at the top of his lungs if you were here to see him," Fanboy told you with a laugh. "But don't worry, I'm cool. I won't say anything."

"Uhhh, thanks," you replied, and then the woman at the front desk was ready for you. Two forms of ID and a signature later, and you were in. 

"That was relatively painless," you muttered to yourself. Not that this was necessarily a grand gesture, but you had come through the main gate and Fanboy clearly knew what was going on. So it felt like something. The last thing you wanted was to have Bradley upset with you right before the mission started. Now you just had to find his room in this huge maze. You remembered his room number, so you just walked around until you found the correct hallway. 

As you neared his room, you felt your phone vibrating in your pocket.

Bradley Rooster Bradshaw <3 &lt;3 <3: i'm so sorry, i should never have talked to you like that 

Bradley Rooster Bradshaw <3 <3 <3: will you please call me when you can? you can call me anytime, even if you leave the hard deck late

Your heart couldn't handle much more as you knocked gently on his door. Because what if Maria was right, what if he was in love with you?

"Yeah?" he asked as he opened his door a little bit and then froze in surprise, his phone still in his hand. He was wearing just gym shorts, and he had clearly been running his hands through his messy hair. "Y/N. What are you doing here?" 

"I told you I wanted to come with you, but you left."

He poked his head out into the hallway and looked around, still puzzled. "How did you get in here?" 

"I checked in at the front desk."

"You did? But you have to give the name of whoever you're here to see. And you have to sign in with your full name and military ID."

"You don't think I know your name, Bradley Bradshaw? And I always have my ID on me."

Bradley just stared at you.

"Stop giving me that look. You're not my dirty little secret. Fanboy just saw me anyway... he knows I'm here to see you. He guessed it right away, quite possibly because I am generally doing a terrible job at hiding the way I feel about you. I'm so far gone over you, I might as well have Rooster sharpied on my face. But I don't even care if Fanboy knows, because you're not my dirty little secret, Bradley!"

He reached for you and pulled you into his arms. "I'm sorry I said that to you, Sweetheart. I shouldn't have done any of that. And if you want to talk to Kyle, that's your business. Even though I still think he's an asshole."

You leaned your cheek against his warm chest. You were standing in the middle of the open doorway, and you could hear people walking up and down the corridors. Bradley tried to pull you inside, but you dug your heels in. "Are you seriously jealous of him? Or Jake? Because if I wanted somebody else, I wouldn't be with you every single day as soon as work ends."

Bradley kissed your forehead. "I'm just frustrated, Baby Girl. And I should never take that out on you."

You felt like you were on the verge of tears. "I'm sorry too. And I didn't come here just to mess around, I came here to spend time with you. I always like spending time with you, Roo." You rubbed your face against him. "But I also don't know how I'm supposed to control myself when I want you all the time, Bradley! I feel the need in my bones. But truly, I didn't mean to make you feel bad about yourself. I didn't even know I was doing it."

Bradley leaned against the doorframe and held you as several officers walked by. "I want you all the time too, Baby Girl. Sometimes it makes it hard to think. And I was frustrated, because I know you'll sit at the bar at the Hard Deck with other guys for more than ten minutes, right out in the open. Hell, the only date we really went on that was just the two of us was nowhere near base. Is that the only reason you agreed to it?"

You kissed his chest, his deep breaths calming you. "No, that's not the reason at all. I begged you to ask me out a second time, because I wanted to be with you. And it was the best date ever, because being around you makes me feel good in every way."

"You make me feel good too."

"I just wish we had more time. I just need more time," you whispered, and when Bradley pulled you inside, you went with him.

-------------------------

Oh Bradley, you're definitely a little dirty, but nobody would keep you a secret for long.

This chapter includes a request from @rosesinmars who asked for a little more jealousy. Hope you enjoyed this one!

Check out Part 14

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[deathbypixelz]

Alright. I'm making this post because I was unpleasantly surprised to find Microsoft had forcibly downloaded an """"ai assistant"""" onto my computer (called Copilot), and because finding a site that actually told me how to kill it for good -- in clear, truly step-by-step terms -- was way harder than it needed to be.

Preface: this is only relevant if you're running Windows 11.

Here is your target:

If you see this logo on your taskbar -- or... have Edge installed on Windows 11 -- you've got Copilot. You can't delete it on its own, Microsoft has integrated it into the OS as best they can. The most you can do is disable it (instructions for which are at the very end of this post).

So... to REALLY get rid of it you need to uninstall Microsoft Edge, because it's a part of/reliant on Edge. A lot of bells and whistles of Windows are also reliant on Edge, like widgets, but I never use those. I use my PC almost exclusively for gaming, and I don't want this slimy "ai" shit on my computer. I use Firefox anyway. Edge can go die as far as I'm concerned.

Here's the actual steps, copy-pasted from a website that took me way too long to find. It also really makes my browser chug for some reason, which is why I'm copy-pasting the whole thing. If you still want to look at the site itself, put it in reader view as fast as you can (link to site).

1.) Open Microsoft Edge, type "edge://settings/help" in the address bar, and then press Enter.

2.) Click "About Microsoft Edge" at the bottom of the left-hand pane. Copy the version number at the top of the screen, under Microsoft Edge.

3.) Press Windows Key + S to open Windows Search.

4.) Type "Command Prompt", right-click the result, and then select "Run as Administrator".

5.) The User Account Control (UAC) prompt will appear. Click "Yes".

6.) Navigate to Edge’s “Installer” directory by using the cd command. Depending on which directory your Command Prompt opens in by default, you may need to use the "cd .." command to go back a level or two.

Once ready, run this command:

cd “Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\Version Number\Installer”

Replace "Version Number" with your actual version number copied earlier.

7.) Next, run this command to uninstall Microsoft Edge:

setup –uninstall –force-uninstall –system-level

((It will look like nothing happened! Don't worry!))

8.) Restart your PC for the changes to take place.

((HOWEVER, Windows will try to reinstall it the next time your PC updates (or whenever it feels like it lol) so there's a second half to this))

1.) Press Windows Key + R to open Run.

2.) Type "regedit" in the text box and click OK to open the Registry Editor.

3.) The User Account Control (UAC) prompt will appear. Click "Yes".

4.) In the Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINES\SOFTWARE\Microsoft.

5.) Right-click the "Microsoft" folder, hover your cursor over "New", and then select "Key".

6.) Rename the new Key to "EdgeUpdate".

7.) Right-click EdgeUpdate, hover your cursor over "New", and then select "DWORD (32-bit) Value".

8.) Right-click the new value, which is currently named "New Value #1".

9.) Select "Rename" from the context menu.

10.) Rename the value to "DoNotUpdateToEdgeWithChromium".

11.) Right-click the newly-named DoNotUpdateToEdgeWithChromium value and select "Modify" from the context menu.

12.) The Edit DWORD (32-bit) Value window will appear. Change the Value data to "1" and then click OK.

((You are now free. If you ever run into a really serious, unavoidable issue with your OS that's clearly a result of Edge being gone, you can redownload it like a regular app. But you should be fine.))

((And, if for some reason you want still want Edge around but just want the copilot thing gone, here's what you do:

The command, for ease of copy-pasting: reg add HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot /v TurnOffWindowsCopilot /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

You can't actually truly delete Copilot (without deleting Edge), only disable it. And as the reply says, you do have to do this every time you turn the computer on. I haven't tested that myself, but I believe it. I assume/hope that excludes just waking the computer up after it goes to sleep, but I don't know for sure.))

[tiya-minuscule]

Apologies if this has been asked before but what medium / art supplies do u use for ur fancomics ? To me it looks like an ink pen and the text is digital ? Do u prefer to draw traditional over digital ? LOVE ur art by the way 💕💕💕💕💕 inspires me so much !!

Hey Anon ! You are absolutly right about the process :D Here is the version of the comic on paper on the couch I drew it with my favorite ink pen !

When I'm done with the drawings, I scan everything ! Here is a version of a page without any editing.

I wrote all the dialogues in french fisrt, so I don't think about the translation when I draw. But first thing first, I like to rearrenge the drawing to make it easier for the reader. For exemple :

I also like to erase some of the construction line so you can see more of the facial expression and make it less rough.

So here is the final product after the editing and the cleaning :

I always write a first version of the translation then I sent it to @lutiaslayton who kindly give some of her time to correct my spelling and grammar mistakes and even suggest some translation so the final text stays as close as possible to what I intended to say in the original version :D And then I post everything and wait to see your kind words <3 I do all this editing on TvPaint which is an animation software. It's not very logical, but it truely has the best cleaning scan tool ! Most of the time, I prefer to draw traditional because on digital I always tend to seak perfection and erase or redo things over and over again... And for this project I really want to keep it smooth and improvised, so paper is the best option :) Also, I professionnaly work a lots on computer so it feels really refreshing to draw on paper again ! So now you know everything Anon, thanks for your kind words :)

[seriously-mike]

Who's surprised, because I am not?

When ChatGPT set the world on fire a year and a half ago, it sparked a feverish search for ways to catch people trying to pass off AI text as their own writing. A host of startups launched to fill the void through AI detection tools, with names including Copyleaks, GPTZero, Originality.AI, and Winston AI. It makes for a tidy business in a landscape full of AI boogeymen. These companies advertise peace of mind, a way to take back control through “proof” and “accountability.” Some advertise accuracy rates as high as 99.98%. But a growing body of experts, studies, and industry insiders argue these tools are far less reliable than their makers promise. There’s no question that AI detectors make frequent mistakes, and innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire. Countless students have been accused of AI plagiarism, but a quieter epidemic is happening in the professional world. Some writing gigs are drying up thanks to chatbots. As people fight over the dwindling field of work, writers are losing jobs over false accusations from AI detectors.

Of course. Just like I showed you a few weeks ago, an AI-generated image that is even marketed as such by the seller, was claimed to be "99.9% accurately" not AI-generated. A photo of the Mona Lisa uploaded to Wikipedia Commons thirteen years ago was claimed to be "99.9% accurately" AI-generated. We're having snake oil salesmen preying on moronic Butlerian Jihadi types with claims like this, with innocent people losing their jobs and chances for education.

In general, AI detectors work by spotting the hallmarks of AI penmanship, such as perfect grammar and punctuation. In fact, one of the easiest ways to get your work flagged is to use Grammarly, a tool that checks for spelling and grammatical errors. It even suggests ways to rewrite sentences for clarity using, you guessed it, artificial intelligence. Adding insult to injury, Gizmodo spoke to writers who said they were fired by platforms that required them to use Grammarly.

What. The. FUCK. If anything, computers are fairly good at scanning things and comparing them with rigid references, like style books and grammar manuals, often against the human writer's wishes (for example because a certain unorthodox turn of phrase is intended to shock the reader, or there's a play on words that cannot be expressed differently), but "perfect grammar and punctuation" is certainly not what I would expect from AI algorithms - for example, in the first minute or two of the Robert Makłowicz Gravel Bullshit I could hear ChatGPT stumbling over genders and grammatical cases, much like I sometimes do myself, particularly when typing quickly or in a runaway sentence.

Detectors look for more telling factors as well, such as “burstiness.” Human writers are more likely to reuse certain words in clusters or bursts, while AI is more likely to distribute words evenly across a document. AI detectors can also assess “perplexity,” which essentially asks an AI to measure the likelihood that it would have produced a piece of text given the model’s training data.

"Burstiness"? "Perplexity"? What kind of Stephen Colbert horseshit is this? I mean, seriously, those words sound like someone made them up for The Stephen Colbert Show "The Wørd" segment, in a "fuck me if I know what my software is doing" way. Like, you put the text in, pull the lever, the machine spits out the verdict and you're supposed to kowtow to its Grand, All-Encompassing Wisdom now. How it does what it does? You're not supposed to know and I'm not explaining it to you either, mostly because I have no idea myself. Magic everywhere in this bitch, man.

AI detection companies “are in the business of selling snake oil,” said Debora Weber-Wulff, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences for Engineering and Economics in Berlin, who co-authored a recent paper about the effectiveness of AI detection. According to Weber-Wulff, research shows that AI detectors are inaccurate, unreliable, and easy to fool. “People want to believe that there can be some magic software that solves their problems,” she said. But “computer software cannot solve social problems. We have to find other solutions.”

Of fucking course, why am I not surprised. Generative AI is snake oil as it fails to replace actual artists to any considerable degree (unless we're talking generic editorial cartoons you could left-hand in 15 minutes - DALL-E will left-hand something more specific in 30 seconds, particularly for the purposes of a dodgy third-rate website), and detecting AI is just as shit, much like I pointed out before. It's laughable, actually: we have companies run submitted writing through dodgy detectors in order to weasel out of paying, when in other circumstances they'd promptly have ChatGPT on the job of writing insipid clickbait listicles in order to weasel out of paying. It's like "I can fuck you over anytime, but god forbid you try to fuck me over".

“We hear these stories more than we wish we did, and we understand the pain that false positives cause writers when the work they poured their heart and soul into gets falsely accused,” said Jonathan Gillham, CEO of Originality.AI. “We feel like we feel like we’re building a tool to help writers, but we know that at times it does have some consequences.”

No, buddy, fuck you. Fuck you a thousand times with a fucking cactus. You're selling snake oil, you know it's not working and here you are playing dumb that your software just works, and when it inevitably fails, again and again, you're pretending it's not your fault, you coprolithically retarded cunt.

But Originality and other AI detectors send mixed messages about how their tools should be used. For example, Gillham said “we advise against the tool being used within academia, and strongly recommend against being used for disciplinary action.” He explained the risk of false positives is too high for students, because they submit a small number of essays throughout a school year, but the volume of work produced by a professional writer means the algorithm has more chances to get it right. However, on one of the company’s blog posts, Originality says AI detection is “essential” in the classroom.

CUNT.

Then there’s the way the company describes its algorithm. According to Originality, the latest version of its tool has a 98.8% accuracy rate, but Originality also says its false positive rate is 2.8%. If you’ve got your calculator handy, you’ll notice that adds up to more than 100%. Gillham said that’s because these numbers come from two different tests.

ABSOLUTE MOTHERFUCKING LYING CUNT.

Now don't be surprised that they're going to lie in multiple ways and make shit up only to make a buck on selling the tech to the gullible and, more importantly, the maliciously prejudiced. In the end, the whole thing is about money, and money curiously causes people to stop thinking about everything else.

[vergess]

What's covered by "prose editing"? Do you mean editor's services for articles and original work, SPAG for school work, beta-reading fanfiction, workshopping shitposts, what kind of services are we talking here?

I've edited for each of those media (primary and secondary school; fandom; shitposting), as well as the following:

Technical manuals (Chicago and Microsoft styles)

Newspapers, including strict character limits (AP style)

Copy and editing for research journal submissions (style provided by journal)

Print and digital magazines (style provided by publisher)

University level creative writing composition for short stories and novellas

Novel editing for slush submissions and indie publishing

The specific skills I have on offer include:

Spelling, punctuation and grammar (English-US and English-UK)

Developmental and structural edits

Content editing only for styles or fandoms with which I am already familiar, or for which a style guide is provided.

Redlining and line edits, with fact checks only for non-technical writing

Proofing, including print and digital proofing

Now, for readers who stared at "SPAG" for a second like "wtf does that even mean," here's some extra clarification on what those services are.

SPAG (spelling, punctuation, and grammar) is the most basic type of editing. It can usually be done by a computer automatically, though MS Word's grammar checker is notoriously bad.

Developmental edits are focused on helping the author decide their audience, conform to or break genre expectations, and develop the broad order of story elements.

Structural edits are focused on achieving the goals from development as effectively as possible. In fiction, this is the point at which cuts tend to start, with smaller characters being merged into single, more prominent characters. In technical writing, this is the point at which you determine things like the order in which data will be presented, what needs to be in the introduction rather than methodologies, etc. For writing manuals and documentation, this is the point at which you determine the specific categories and organization you will be using.

Content edits are what most people think of when they think "editor." This is the point at which the finished draft has been organized to the author's satisfaction, and the editor proceeds to go through it looking for style and factual errors. A style error varies based on the medium: something correct for a software manual in MSWG would be wildly wrong for a school essay in MLA or for a fanfic about Supernatural.

I consider informal manuals like Britpickers' Guides to be sufficient for most things in fandom, so if you have anything like that, then I'm happy to do content edits for unfamiliar fandoms too. However, if I am not familiar with a fandoms' canon, I cannot fact check the piece for canon compliance.

Line edits are sometimes called "punch ups" or "redlining." It is not related to the art technique or financial racism law. Line edit is the more common name. This is the point at which an editor goes line by line or paragraph by paragraph through a completed piece to adjust phrasing for maximum impact. If you've never seen a redline for text, here's an example of a redline I did last year:

None still living know what once sat where Refinement now rises from the Bismuth sea. > None alive yet know what once sat where Refinement rises from the Bismuth Sea. Rumors and speculation abound, but the one accepted fact is that the city sprang from the singular will and vision of one woman: the Founder. > Rumors abound, but only one truth is known universally: the city sprang from the will and vision of their singular Founder. No other figure in Refinement commands the same admiration and reverence. > No other figure in Refinement’s history commands more admiration and reverence. Though her name, age, and even species are argued over to this day, some details of her origins and mastery of the stuff of the Bismuth Sea are yet agreed upon. > Her name, age, and even species are as lost as whatever came before the city. Two pale shadows of her legacy remain: the myth of her origin, and the legend of her mastery over the chaotic tides of the Bismuth Sea.

Proofing is the last possible stage in editing, and occurs immediately before printing (traditional media) or publication (digital media). It's your opportunity to double check the piece for minor typos you missed before.

For print media in particular, it's extremely important to proof thoroughly. Once the book is printed, it cannot be changed. And worse, the process of composing a draft into a printable format can introduce errors, with hanging words on blank pages, or words cut off entirely!

For digital media, this is a less mission critical stage, as you can always correct the piece after it is live. There are two major exceptions to this: news writing, and school work. In both these cases, because the damage done by incorrect proofing is high and the opportunity to issue a correction is low, you should always proof schoolwork and news, even if it is submitted/published digitally.

So!

That's all of the editorial services I can offer!

Honestly, seeing it laid out like this, I think $10/1k words is a steal.

[drawdownbooks]

Collection of Research on Chinese Typography (中文文字设计研究选集) A three-volume collection of on-going research and writing about typography and design in China. Includes coverage of typography and design's history and development, conventions and contemporary practices, as well as applications in transcultural contexts.

Available at Draw Down Books

This set has been produced by The Type (Type is Beautiful), an online platform that has promoted an awareness of typography and design to the Chinese-speaking public for over ten years. The Type introduces Western typographic theories and knowledge to its readers, conducts independent research on Chinese typography, and aims to address both typography education in China, and the lack of exchange Chinese designers have typically had with the international community of designers.

This compact set includes:

上海活字：管窥现代中文字体设计史 Shanghai Type: A Slice of Modern Chinese Type History

The development of Chinese type design since the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949 has cast a significant influence on contemporary practice. Yet this history has remained as much a mystery to the outside world as to local designers. This volume, based on designer Li Zhiqian's Shanghai Type research project, illuminates a portion of modern Chinese type design's history—tracing how it began as a groundbreaking state-initiated endeavor, and then gradually was transformed, fading in the age of commercialization. Consultant: Chen Qirui. Edited by Richor Wang.

跨文化字体设计：中文语境下的讨论 Transcultural Type Design: a Dialogue from China

Among Chinese-speaking designers, discourse around transcultural typography is still in its infancy. This volume is the record of the first of a series of open discussions moderated by The Type, which addresses both this global trend as well as the debate and strategies that are specific to the Chinese context. Moderated by Mira Yang, with panelists Peiran Tan, Li Zhiqian, Zheng Chuyang, Du Xiyao, Tien-min Liao, and Roman Wilhelm.

孔雀计划：重建中文排版的思路 Kǒngquè: Restoring the Mindset of Chinese Typesetting

The convention and wisdom of Chinese typography that was developed over centuries has failed to be inherited by designers today. This is caused partially by the domination of Latin-orientated computer software, coupled with negligence in Chinese design education. The Kǒngquè project aims to fill this gap by revisiting the typographic traditions of China in the modern context and restoring the traditions and mindset of native Chinese typography. By Eric Liu.

Editor-in-Chief: Rex Chen Series Editor: Mira Ying Translators: Hui Jing, Peiran Tan

Designed by Atmosphere Office

Published by The Type, 2020 Bilingual, text in English and Chinese

3 volumes: (Shanghai Type) 116 pages, with 2-color 7.5 × 11 inch mini-poster / (Transcultural Type Design) 122 pages / (Kǒngquè) 104 pages, b&w, 4.3 × 5.75 inches

ISBN: 978-1-91-624848-0-7

[dearestones]

A Weirdo at the Library (Brian Thomas and Reader)

Warnings: Reader is too curious for their own good, slight horror.

Anonymous Request: Could I have the Prompt "Why should I trust you?" For Hoodie from Marble Hornets?

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There’s a strange man who frequents your library from the time it opens until it closes. He's dressed in a tan hooded sweatshirt, a black hat that looked better worn during the winter months, and a blank expression on his face that never quite seems to emote. Even though you usually arrive at work a few minutes before the start of your workday, the man is usually hunched over by the entrance, his stance clearly relaxed.

For as long as you've remembered, the man was always alone. Aside from the backpack that housed a laptop and a few other essentials you were not privy to, he had no other belongings. Briefly, whenever you decided to give him some thought, you wondered if he was homeless.

It would make sense.

The clothes usually stayed the same, the scent of mustiness that reminded you of campsites and forests filling your nostrils. However, other than his permanent outfit, you had the feeling that he wasn't an absolute slob. You had no right to judge, but you had the feeling that maybe he frequented public facilities like local gyms to accommodate his hygienic needs. 

Maybe he did have a home and you were overthinking.

Whatever the case, it didn't matter.

You always unlocked the door for him if you were the first to clock in and it went unspoken amongst your colleagues that it was best not to disturb the man.

And so, it went like that for months, maybe even years. You weren't particularly too detail oriented about the specifics of how long you had known the man in the tan hoodie, but you did know that it was rare not to see him in the library.

Even though it was none of your business, you often wondered if he worked solely through remote means. Perhaps he didn't have wifi wherever he lived and was utilizing the library's resources. Sometimes, whenever you glanced up from your desk or reshelved books into their proper places, you would find him leaving his laptop behind on one of the tables he monopolized for himself to peruse the bookshelves. He never checked out a book to take home, but you did catch him bussing stacks of texts to his table. Minutes later, he would end up scribbling on scraps of paper he would tear from battered notebooks. 

On the rare occasion that you were the sole person to reshelve the books he left behind, you realized that he was picking up books about codes, ciphers, and texts about computer programming and software.

In the beginning, you chalked it up to a hobby that he liked to pursue in the midst of his work.

That is, until you managed to get a good look at his laptop and the notes that he left on the table one afternoon.

At the very beginning, the man in the tan hoodie used to close his laptop shut and flip over his notepad or weigh it down with a series of reference texts. However, for some reason unknown to you, he must have felt relaxed enough to leave everything on his work station available for everyone to see. You spotted him retreating into the men's bathroom—not an unusual scene—but you happened to be only a few feet away from his table at that exact moment.

Your next few actions were unprecedented and unconscious.

As a librarian, you learned from the very beginning not to judge people for their tastes and preferences. So what if there was a middle aged woman reading erotica meant for women years younger than her? Or that was a young man reading a children's series about school mysteries? Or that there was a straightlaced businessman checking out a niche manga series from the nineties? Checking out books meant more engagement, which could potentially lead to more funding for your library. You only checked their library card and made sure that they returned their books on time.

But this was the man in the tan hooded sweatshirt.

He was a mystery who not only perplexed you, but also your coworkers. 

What you were going to do next was neither illegal nor immoral… Perhaps a little questionable, but that meant nothing! 

It wasn’t wrong to take a quick glance at someone’s work, just a passing glance nothing more. Everyone always caught a glimpse that wasn’t necessarily their business, so why was this any different? And if you were caught, you could say that you had dropped something near his work space… You were merely an unobtrusive, simple librarian. What was this man going to do to you for being curious?

Your interest had been piqued so long ago and you had been patient, you needed to know.

Before you could stop yourself, you swiftly walked over to the table and took a sneak peek at his laptop. 

What you saw on the screen looked banal and not at all what you expected to see from the man in the tan hoodie. He used a browser unfamiliar to you, but anyone from a mile away could initially recognize the layout of YouTube. You focused on the video player upon the screen, squinting at the video’s title.

It appeared to be nondescript and unassuming; it was titled “entry” followed by what you assumed was its corresponding number. 

The uploader of the video was also unknown, but their handle was far more whimsical than you had expected from the title alone. Marble Hornets, you read. What, were the hornets made out of marble? Or were they marbles with hornets in them? 

Still, the name stuck with you despite it all. 

You found your eyes drifting past the keyboard and onto the series of books and scraps of paper that littered the majority of his table. For some unfathomable reason, a number of those scraps of paper were littered with dozens of sketches of pine trees, strange circles that were crossed out, and vague, disturbing warnings about something watching in the woods. You dared not touch any of the scraps lest you leave incriminating evidence behind, but you did see that one of the reference texts was open to a page about encryption methods. 

Glossing over the contents, you didn’t learn too much except that whoever the man was, he was smart. 

Whatever the case, you didn’t want to any longer than you had to. It was one thing to sneak a glance at his belongings, quite another to be caught theorizing right in front of him. Quickly, you hurried off to another part of the library, something nondescript like the children’s section. 

No sooner did you help a child pull the newest picture book off of a shelf did you spot the man striding from the bathroom and towards his spot. Averting your eyes, you gently reminded the child to not tear the pages and to ask for more help if they needed it. Excited and eager to please, the child thanked you heartily and skipped away to whom you thought was their guardian. 

You happened to turn around at that exact moment—later on, you would contemplate why—only to find that the man in the tan hoodie was staring at you. Normally, whenever you found yourself locking eyes with the man—usually in passing—one or both of you would nod in acknowledgement before quickly turning away. That simply wasn’t the case now. 

For five complete seconds, his eyes held you in place, the expression on his face strange and surreal to see on his normally impassive visage. 

And then—

When you began entertaining the idea that maybe he knew or had seen you retreating, he turned away and began scribbling something in one of his papers. 

You could only hope that he wasn’t furiously drawing more trees. 

After that incident, you forgot about that strange man. 

At the end of the day, you were still a librarian and that meant that you still had to cater to a variety of people's interests. There were a group of young ladies who wanted to know if the latest romance novel by a famous author had been shipped. An older gentleman with a hearing impairment asked if there were any books about developmental psychology. There were other questions and requests; all of them, you were sure to fulfill to the best of your ability. 

Shortly after, the librarian closed and you watched as the stragglers gathered the last of their books, logged off their computers, or printed out the last of their research papers. Once that was done, you said goodbye to your fellow coworker, some of whom decided to stay a little later just to tidy up and gossip.

You laughed a little at that, but wished them the best for their evenings before you stepped out of the premises and into the chilly evening air. Having been working in this library for a while now, your guard wasn't up as you walked into the near empty parking lot, your car parked strategically near a lamplight so that it illuminated it perfectly. As you unlocked your vehicle, you began to feel a tickling sensation at the nape of your neck that trickled down your spine and raised the skin on your arms.

Someone was watching you, possibly from behind.

On guard, you immediately turned around, your keys wrapped in your fist as if you were brandishing a knife. Before you could initiate a stabbing or slashing motion should you find someone or something standing behind you, your hand was immediately intercepted by someone who was stronger than you. The shock of being caught without so much as a backup plan hindered you from recognizing the person holding you hostage until you noticed that the man was wearing a tan hoodie and that same expression on his face that you spotted him wearing him the last time you saw him, was aimed at you. 

It was wariness and suspicion. 

“What did you see?” 

His voice was raspy and soft, as if it had been a long time since he had used it. However, you could not deny that even though there was a lack of volume, there was a notable threat—as if the tightening hold on your wrist wasn’t enough. 

“W-what—”

“Don’t play stupid.” His grip flexed and you had no choice but to let go of the keys. As they cluttered onto the ground, he relaxed the hold he had on you, but the look in his eyes was still suspicious. But there was also an undercurrent of desperation. “What did you see?”

Maybe he had known all along that you had been watching him. 

You were stupid to think that you could get away with this, but it was all for curiosity’s sake! There was no way he was getting riled up over something this stupid!

“F-fine!” You gritted your teeth and answered, “All I saw was a YouTube video and some of your creepy drawings. Happy?”

His eyes hardened. “You’re the one snooping through my belongings. Why should I trust you?”

You bit the inside of your mouth. “Okay, it was wrong of me to take a look—it was just a loo!—and I should have respected your space! I’m sorry! I didn’t see anything other than that! Honest!”

Finally, after you thought that he was sizing you up for a mugging, the man in the tan hoodie finally let go and practically shoved you into your driver’s seat. You tripped, but managed to right yourself so that you could cast one more fearful glance at your attacker. 

“What the—”

“Go home, stay home. And don’t go snooping into places you aren’t supposed to.”

Had you the bravery, you would have retaliated, but you could barely stomach your shock when he grabbed your keys from the ground before throwing them into your lap. 

By the time you slammed your door shut, locked and made sure all of your windows were secure, and started the ignition, the stranger was long gone.

That was the last time you ever saw him. 

However, you couldn’t help but sense the feeling that something was following you. Always in the periphery of your vision, but never quite coming into focus. It was not the man in the tan hoodie, but it was something far more malevolent.

And it reminded you of the strange drawings that the man had scribbled. 

What else had you seen?

Oh. You remembered now. 

A tall, slender man hiding among the trees. 

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If you want to donate a Ko-Fi, feel free https://ko-fi.com/devintrinidad.

MARBLE HORNETS MASTERLIST

[diorngl]

Help In Jimin Promotion | How to edit Positive Jimin content

Creating positive Jimin content

Want to make a jimin edit but don't know how?

In this post I will do my best to guide you through the basics of editing so you can promote jimin in a positive way.

Before you start to make your Jimin content, and ask yourself the following questions:

📍 What do I want people to think about Jimin after they watch the video? 📍 How do I want them to feel about Jimin after watching the video? 📍 What do I want to achieve with the video? 📍 What do I want people to do after watching the video?

Having these goals in mind will help give you a clear picture of what you want your content to achieve in the long run for the benefit of Jimin's image.

Remember: we want the content to highlight him in a positive light.

After you thought carefully and planned your intentions, let's start editing!

For Youtube Videos:

Editing softwares: I recommend Movavi and Filmora, both are free to use and are very beginner friendly.

For more advanced editors, Sony vegas pro is a great one.

Watch editing tutorials on youtube for the specific app/software you want to use, and edit as much as you can. You don't have to be the best editor out there to make good jimin content, just edit as much you can, the more editing you do, the better you'll get.

if you feel a little lost with what type of content you want to make, look at your favorite edits/videos, study those and use them as a guide for your edits. (make sure to put on your own unique spin on them).

Note: it's not always about having tons of effects in your videos, sure it looks cool but having too many effects can actually distract from the point you're trying make across to the viewer, so sometimes less is more.

Text to speech - if you're not sure you want to use your voice for videos, text to speech is the perfect alternative to make your videos more engaging without having to do that. There are plenty of free text to speech mobile apps out there, use the most simple ones for your videos.

If you're using a PC/windows, all you need to do is use OneNote, the app is usually already on your computer but if it's not, simply download it from the microsoft store. Write the text you want to use for your videos, and then have the app read it to you through clicking on immersive reader, record it with the windows free voice recorder, and there you have it!

All you need to do is transfer the recorded track to your editing software, match your video clips with voice recording and you're done! This video explains step by step how to do this:

Background music: For tiktok, you can add any music/sound you want in the background, but If your video is meant for youtube, make sure to use copyright free music.

For Tiktok/Youtube shorts:

There are plenty of tutorials out there on how to make tiktok edits, the more popular ones to tend be made with:

CapCut app

But you can make a tiktok edit with any software as long as you make the video 19:6 (vertical).

There's definitely a need for more informative tiktok videos with accurate facts on Jimin, so you can use the text to speech for those as well!

Editing is a fun and effective way of relaying information in a way that sticks in people's mind, which is what we need in order to counter the false narratives, change the narrative surrounding Jimin and introducing him to new people.

And most importantly:

Make sure your content shows Jimin for who is, free of any false narratives and tropes. Show people the qualities that make him the great person and one in a lifetime performer he is. Make them see what YOU see about Jimin.

We can't blame people for not knowing what we know about him, we need to show it to them.

Making content is the best way to do so. The same way that haters spread misinfo about him, is the same way we need to spread positive info about him. Make people see what made you a fan and inspire more and more people to show their love for Jimin openly.

[everygame]

Merry Christmas From Melbourne House (Commodore 64) Developed/Published by: Melbourne House Released: 1984 Completed: 11/12/2023 Completion: Beat it with a score of 100 out of 100.

It’s 1984 and the Christmas cash-in market is finally mature, with five whole games released for home computers (at the very least.) Alphabetically first in my list (because Icon Software chose to go with “Xmas” on their merry release) Merry Christmas From Melbourne House is a slight cheat because it’s really just a tiny tech demo/bit of marketing, but it was sold, costing 95p (the price of tape duplication and postage?) for readers of Commodore User (it was actually in the December issue and the deadline was December 17th to get your money to them, which makes me wonder how many people played this long after things stopped being festive.)

It is though, honestly, what I was kind of expecting from A Christmas Adventure. It’s a short, very easy little adventure game that… passes about half an hour and actually manages to feel Christmassy. 

Like A Christmas Adventure, you’re tasked with making sure Santa can get away from the north pole to deliver presents, but in a shocking twist… YOU are Santa. The game’s blurb claims he’s “attempting to stop an industrial dispute” that “is threatening the delivery of toys to children of the world” and it sounds like jolly old saint nick is a fat cat like the rest of ‘em, and out of solidarity with the elves and workers everywhere I spent quite a bit of time typing things like “GIVE ELVES RAISE” and “PROVIDE TIME OFF” but the parser never understood it, so I almost didn’t finish this.

The plot is a bit oversold anyway, considering the solution is pretty much “Get off your fat arse and pack your sack of toys yourself, Santa.”

As you’re not doing all that much, the parser is adequate, and the graphics are… genuinely quite evocative. They are important too–the toys you have to pack are all on one screen. I don’t generally like this design in graphic text adventures–where you don’t get told everything in text (I’m a VERBOSE man in Infocom games)–and having to work out directions here was not my favourite, But it worked well enough, and I was even charmed by the full screen advert for Melbourne House games.

Anyway, lemme see how much 95p is in today’s money. £3.77. I can’t really say people got their money’s worth here, but they could do a lot worse.

Will I ever play it again? I’m good.

Final Thought: Joe Pranevich over at The Adventurer’s Guild played through this as well if you’d like to read something more in-depth about it, with the bonus that one of the developers, Dave Johnston, shows up in the comments, revealing that it was developed “in a matter on weeks using an in-house text engine and a tweaked sprite engine based on Way of the Exploding Fist code” and that he didn’t even have a copy. They paid people at Melbourne House so poorly that they couldn’t raise 95p???

Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[pricklyest]

What e reader did you buy? Do you recommend it?

I was waiting to answer this when I stopped being sick so I could maybe be coherent but at this point idk when that's going to happen so we're just going to go w it and hope this makes sense sorry

I bought a kobo clara 2e. I wanted the smallest ereader I could find that was a reasonable price and also waterproof because I like to read in the bathtub and I am not immune to dropping things in the water. have ruined more than one book that way, have also ruined a nintendo switch that way.

the kobo ecosystem is not bad in terms of ereaders if you exclusively buy your ebooks from the kobo store. the kobo store is better than the amazon ebook store imo bc it lets you download drm-free versions of your purchases without having to go through any conversions, which I don't think is true of the kindle store.

kobo also lets you upload your own epubs and pdfs to the ereader from your computer pretty easily (you can add them like you would to a flash drive or you can use something like calibre to manage your library for you). there have been a few times when I've plugged my kobo into my computer and it hasn't automatically connected so I had to disconnect and reconnect it but then it worked fine. so it can be finicky but ultimately you should be able to get it.

the software that actually opens the ebooks and that you read with is actually different based on whether it's an epub in the kobo format (the filename will end with .kepub.epub) or literally anything else. kepubs will support more features, like annotations and faster page flips and easy word lookups in dictionaries (especially useful for reading the locked tomb which is Full of vocab words). you can also actually make changes the the font type and size. whereas anything else it just displays and doesn't let you highlight, annotate, or select text text. you can zoom in on things, but that's about it.

the good news is there are a lot of tools that let you turn things into kepubs. I currently use a plugin you can get for calibre, but I'm thinking about trying kepubify bc some of the epubs I've downloaded have turned into funky formatting with the calibre plugin.

right now my kobo clara 2e downsides are 1) device is still bigger than I'd like*, 2) kepub vs other file formats thing is mildly annoying, 3) can't buy ebooks from kobo store via app on my phone, have to either buy from kobo website or from my ereader, 4) screen is often less sensitive than I'm used to with other touch screen devices (this may just be an ereader thing), 5) I can't send books to my kobo wirelessly unless I've purchased them in the kobo store (idk if this is something I could do for other ereader systems, I haven't looked).

*there aren't really any devices from any of the major ereader brands with screens smaller than 6in (which is what the clara 2e has). I also looked at the xiaomi inkpalm 5, which does appear to be an ideal size for me, but you have to do some annoying command line shit to get it running in english and it doesn't appear to be waterproof. I may look into it again if I get sick enough of not having my ereader actually fit in my pants pockets. you could also get an eink phone and use it as an ereader, but they're phone prices instead of ereader prices, and most of them have the same language support issues the xiaomi has. the other thing I looked at is the open book project and the m5 paper which are both diy ereader kits and I'm more inclined to fuck with one of those than the xiaomi if I decide to do something more fun in the future, but I don't have the bandwidth for that right now.

kobo also supports integration with overdrive so you can check out library books, but I have recently discovered my library card is expired and bc I'm sick I haven't gone in to get a new one yet so I have no idea what that looks like and whether or not reading library ebooks uses the good reader (like with kepubs) or the no features reader.

one last annoying thing is the kobo store on the reader keeps trying to tell me to subscribe to kobo plus, which is basically like spotify premium but for ebooks and/or audiobooks. but not all titles ever are included so I haven't really looked into it v much bc rn I've found what I wanted to read through other methods (shout out to standardebooks.org)

anyway overall I would say I'd recommend it if your use case is exactly the same as mine, which is I wanted something small to read in the bath and carry around to hopefully replace my doomscrolling habit with reading like I used to when I was a kid, and it so far has been mildly successful. I did start wearing a fanny pack on a regular basis so that way I could actually carry it around everywhere like my phone, but even with a fanny pack I don't think you could fit something much bigger than 6-7in screen, so I'm not sure anything else would work. if you wanted a bigger ereader, I know someone else who has one of the larger kobos (not sure which one, we don't talk super often) and seems p happy w it. I briefly entertained the idea of getting one from kobo w a stylus and using that to take notes in class bc I saw some people in the ereader subreddit say they liked using it for that, and then I remembered I have an ipad and apple pencil to do that exact thing already and I'm already really happy w that setup.

[xxfanfiction-emo-trinityxx]

Question - Ray Toro x Reader

Prompt: Q: Question (How do they confess? Is it the big question, or something smaller but just as intimate?)(from this list) Reader: can be read as any gender (no pronouns used) Word count: 2 138

Tiredly you ran your hand over your face. The brightness of the computer screen was already tuned to the lowest setting, you had a small lamp burning in the background and most of the software’s design was dark anyway, but still your eyes hurt terribly. A glance at the clock confirmed your suspicion that it was not only the screen brightness that hurt your eyes, but also the amount of time you had spent staring it at.

You had been here since the early morning, only doing a lunch break around noon, and a coffee break around five, when the band had left. My Chem was working on another album and as their trusted assistant they had asked you to help with… well basically everything. Before ever having worked with them you had gathered experience with mixing and producing music, tour booking, promotion and and and, although most of it had been for smaller, local bands.

It had been Ray who had suggested you should be given more freedom in the things you wanted to work at for them. So after having spent the entire day in their company, helping them mix the tracks, you had settled back into your small office in the production company, beginning with the design for the covers. The cover art had been chosen weeks ago, but now title, band name and all the writing needed to be added. It was as much fun as it was nerve wracking.

Just when you had finished adding one text, and zoomed out, you found it looked awful and went back to changing everything again. But now, at almost 2am, you were ready to give up. At least for now. Anything you changed now, was just likely to look awful tomorrow- well, later today.

Saving the current file under a new name, you turned off the computer and grabbed your jacket from the hanger next to the door, before turning the small lamp in the corner off as well.

The lights in the corridor outside flickered to life as you left the office, blinding you momentarily. Groaning at the brightness, you blinked, trying to get used to the lights as well as trying to get rid of the tiredness so you could drive home.

Ray would absolutely give you shit for staying so late at the office again. He always told you, you needed to take better care of yourself, and every time he did, you ignored the fluttering in your chest, instead arguing that you worked best this way, just like he would sometimes not step out of his office for three days straight.

It was a recurring pattern: both of you working without proper breaks and the other getting protective, reminding each other how important breaks were. At the same time, you both understood that you had these creative phases in which you had to work lest you wanted to go mad. But that rational understanding did not mean your heart did not flutter every time Ray reminded you to take good care of yourself.

It was all too easy to imagine he had some personal interest in you being well, even when you knew that in reality he just needed you to be healthy so you could work for the band as effectively as possible. Besides: why should someone like him take interest in you? You were the person in the background. Best case scenario? Nobody noticed you were even there. That meant you had done your job flawlessly. That the band constantly noticed you and tried to involve you in their work was a bigger compliment than you felt you deserved. But Ray was still the guitarist of one of the biggest bands currently around, loved by fans and worshipped by critics. He was certainly one of the kindest men you had ever met, not to mention one of the most talented and most hard working as well. Even if he were looking for a relationship, he most certainly would not look for it with you.

Still you could not blame yourself for falling for him. Anyone with at least a half-way decent taste in men would. And now that winter had wrapped its cold, dark fingers around the city, you just could not help but secretly dream about cuddling into Ray’s side and holding his hand. He always looked so warm, with his long hair, his soft eyes, his gentle smile. He could be the biggest goof, the craziest little nerd you had ever met, but his rambles were endearing and his jokes always made you laugh without fail.

Tiredly, lost in thoughts about Ray and about how much you wanted him to like you back, you shuffled to the back door of the studio. You had your hand already on the handle, when suddenly you perked up. From one of the control rooms faint music sounded out into the corridor. Irritated, you stopped. You had been absolutely certain you were the last one in the building, after all it was in the middle of the night. Walking back, you tried to identify the room the music sounded from, and stopped in front of one of the control rooms. The ‘recording’-light was turned off, so you listened to the gentle plucking of guitar strings for a moment before you pressed down the handle of the door and pushed the door open just far enough to poke your head in.

In the dim, orange light of a small reading lamp, you were able to make out a man sitting on the floor, long, curly hair reaching past his shoulders, guitar in his lap.

At the sound of the door opening, he stopped and turned around.

“I thought you had gone home with the others,” you inquired, raising your eyebrows at Ray.

“I did…” he confessed, unfolding his long legs, and getting up from where he had been sitting. “And then I couldn’t stop thinking so I came back.”

“I heard you play something new,” you noted. “Are you planning to add onto the new album?”

“Not really… it’s just something I’ve had stuck in my head for a long time,” Ray rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, holding his guitar in the other. “I wanted to get it out of my system before I forget it.”

You were burning to know what he had been working on, but if the past years of working with him had taught you anything, it was that he shared his music once he was ready to do so. Anything before that usually ended up making him feel incredibly uncomfortable, and you were more than happy to respect his boundaries.

“Well, in that case…” you trailed off. “Just don’t stay too long. Even you need a few hours of sleep every now and then. Good night Ray.”

You were already back out of the room, the door almost closed when he suddenly called for you.

Confused, you stopped and pushed the door back open, raising your eyebrows at him.

“What’s up?”

“I-“

Ray stared at you wide eyed, his left foot tapping a quick, even rhythm, his fingers clenching and unclenching around the neck of the guitar; safe signs that he was stressed and nervous. You hated when he did that. Not because it annoyed you, but because it made you feel so helpless. In these moments there was nothing you could do to help him feel less nervous, and right now you seemed to be the cause of his nervousness.

Tilting your head at him inquisitively, you encouraged him wordlessly to keep talking. He swallowed thickly before speaking again.

“I- it’s just… I don’t really know how to say it.”

“Whatever it is, you know you can be honest with me. I promise you that I won’t be mad, okay? You can just say it. I don’t need fancy words.”

“It’s not something you’ve done,” sighed Ray, averting his eyes for a moment, before looking back up to you. “No fancy words needed?”

“No fancy words needed,” you reaffirmed.

“I like you. To be honest, I’ve liked you for so long I don’t even know how long anymore. And I don’t think it’s just liking either. It’s so much more and so much stronger than that.”

Completely dumbfounded you stared at Ray. The light behind his back lit up his hair like a halo and the white light falling in from the corridor made it look like he was standing in a spotlight.

“I thought I was good at hiding it, but the other day the guys said they’d known for ages too, and that I should just be honest with you, so here’s me being honest. If it makes things weird, I’m sorry, but I think there’s not much use in hiding it anymore. You probably already knew either way.”

“I- I didn’t. Didn’t know, I mean,” you answered, once Ray had stopped speaking, making him groan quietly as if he regretted his confession already. “But it doesn’t have to make things weird.”

Quickly you fully stepped into the small room, closing the door to the corridor behind you, shutting out the cold, white lights.

“I like you, too,” you clarified. “I just never thought you’d feel remotely the same.”

Ray groaned again. “I thought you knew and were trying to discreetly tell me you’re not interested.”

“You mean I wasn’t painfully obvious about my feelings for- wait. Ray, hold on. You thought I wasn’t interested in you and still straight up just- confessed?”

Your heart ached at the thought. How much courage had it taken him to do that?

“Yeah, I mean… I needed to be sure, once and for all,” he admitted, still awkwardly clenching and unclenching his fingers around the guitar neck.

“I’m glad you did…”

For a moment both of you stood facing each other, not really sure what to do or say now that your feelings had been revealed.

“Uhm, I know this might seem a bit useless since you already know how I feel for you but uhm… I’d really like to take you out some time, for dinner or something. Or like… I don’t know. It’s silly,” Ray stuttered. He barely ever stuttered, which just proved that he was still terribly nervous.

“It’s not silly, and I’d love to,” you quickly answered, glad he had been the first one to ask.

“Really,” Ray smiled happily at you. “When- when would you like to?”

You shrugged, glancing around the room.

“I don’t know… are you gonna stay here for a while and play or are you going to go home soon?”

“I was about to head out… What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that I’ve waited a very long time to go out with you and don’t really want to wait a few days just because society thinks meaningful dates have to be at 8pm. And that there’s a diner that’s open 24/7 just around the corner…”

Ray’s grin grew wider, and quickly he placed the guitar in its stand.

“I’ll just grab my jacket,” he told you, heading towards the door in front of which you were still standing.

Stopping right in front of you, he looked at you for a moment, before he quickly leant over and pressed a short peck to the corner of your lips. His warm skin on yours, his chapped lips, both rough and soft at the same time, made your heart rate spike and heat shoot to your cheeks, the spot where he had touched you tingling.

“Thank you,” he whispered, before stepping around you and through the door into the corridor, where the white lights flickered to life once more.

“What for?” You called after him as he jogged towards the break room where he had left his jacket on a sofa.

“Accepting me.”

He shouted back over his shoulder, leaving you to furrow your brows in confusion.

You were afraid that whatever he had meant by that would need some discussion in the future. After all, you knew how insecure he could be at times and if there was one thing you were certain of, it was that he never would have to be or should be insecure about your feelings for him.

You had barely finished the thought, when Ray already reappeared, fighting to slip into his jacket. By the time he had reached you, he had managed to tuck both sleeves over his wrists, and zip the jacket closed.

“Let’s go,” he decided, surprising you by taking your hand and intertwining his fingers with yours. Shyly you closed your fingers around his bigger hand and smiled to yourself. When Ray saw your expression, he chuckled. “Trust me, when I tell you you’re not the only one who has waited far too long for this.”

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